Blair Kamin: Register building oozed character, despite flaws

Jun. 1, 2013

The Des Moines Register building, with addition, in an undated photo

Written by

Blair Kamin

I loved the Register building at 715 Locust St. I loved the glass-encased globe in the lobby, so redolent of Superman and the Daily Planet. I loved the ink-stained pressmen who made cute little hats out of hot-off-the-presses newspapers. I even loved the tiny trucks idling on the ground floor before they hauled the next day’s one-star edition to Keokuk, Decorah and other far reaches of the state.

In the pre-digital era, before telecommuting and tweeting made newspaper buildings expendable, such structures were supposed to stand as physical embodiments of the special relationship between newspapers and their readers — symbols of journalistic strength, the watchtowers where the watchdogs barked.

The Register building met and exceeded that standard, even though its design was a bastardized mishmash by the time I arrived in the mid-1980s. Despite the awkward agglomeration of physical changes (or, perhaps, because of them), the place oozed character. It was never precious or pretentious.

So it’s hard not to mourn the severing of the longtime link between the Register and 715 Locust.

True, the June move to Capital Square will provide financial sustenance that helps keep the Register’s journalism going — and nothing is more important than that. But it’s hard to put a positive gloss on leaving a building that has witnessed nearly a century of world-class journalists covering Depression and war, farm booms and busts, presidential nominating caucuses and state fairs, Iowa polls and cinnamon rolls.

That sort of patina is priceless and irreplaceable.

When the building opened in 1918, it was handsomely trimmed with classical details and, in truth, a bit behind the times. That aesthetically conservative, rear-guard quality would repeat throughout its history.

The architects, the prolific and distinguished Des Moines firm of Proudfoot, Bird & Rawson, followed a formula that had been developed and perfected in such Chicago high-rises as the Marquette Building more than 20 years earlier. The building’s three parts — a richly decorated bottom, a relatively plain midsection, and a top crowned by a sharply projecting cornice — recalled the base, shaft and capital of a classical column.

The facade’s masonry and glass honeycomb was no architectural caprice. It had the virtue of expressing the building’s underlying steel frame. It also allowed natural light to penetrate far into the offices and had operable windows, an essential feature in those pre-air conditioning days.

Proudfoot, Bird & Rawson would turn out more elegant skyscrapers, most notably the Gothic Revival, 19-story Equitable Building just down the street at 604 Locust St. Yet their Register design was solid commercial architecture.

As technology and architectural fashions changed, however, it did not stand still.

A handsome Art Moderne addition, complete with a stylishly curving metal canopy and ribbon windows that showcased the mighty printing presses, went up at Eighth and Locust in 1947. It also housed the Register’s fourth-floor newsroom. The lobby globe was installed in 1950, 20 years after the famous Art Deco revolving globe in the Daily News Building in New York.

And then, in 1960, eight years after the dazzling debut of New York’s Lever House, came the awful decision to cover the Register high-rise in a modernist, metal-and-glass “curtain wall.” According to Steve Stimmel, a partner with Brooks Borg Skiles in Des Moines, the successor of the Proudfoot firm, original stone and terra cotta decoration was sheared off to make way for the new facade.

When Des Moines architect Cal Lewis of Charles Herbert & Associates designed a skywalk lobby for the Register that opened in 1983, he included a subtle protest against this act of vandalism. He made a centerpiece of his design a painting of the original Register tower, as if to say: “Big mistake.”

This was right before I arrived, a green kid out of graduate school who was thrilled to be working alongside such talents as Ken Fuson and Larry Fruhling. We were typing away in a just-renovated newsroom with bold diagonal stripes on the floor and maps of Iowa painted in black outlines on the white walls of editors’ glassed-in offices. I can’t think of a more artful place to learn the craft of journalism. It was simultaneously elegant and full of energy.

Since then, that newsroom, the Register and the news business have all been rocked by disruptive change. The shifts have been so seismic that they make the original building’s suggestion of solidity and permanence seem like an illusion. Even so, I’ll always love the old tower and everything it stood for: rock-solid journalistic integrity, the newspaper as good citizen, the Register as Iowa’s beacon of truth.

Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin was a reporter and architecture critic for the Register from 1984 to 1987. He has just completed a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard University.